popsublime

Saturday, February 10, 2018

I met Tommy Page back in 1990, when I was only 17. As the editor of my high school newspaper in suburban Cincinnati at that time, I possessed a youthful fearlessness and a love for pop music that convinced me it would be totally fine to call up music labels in New York and request to interview their artists on summer concert tours. To my surprise, it always worked. I went to a fairly large high school of about 1,500 students, the perfect audience of middle American teenagers to whom those record labels wanted to sell cassette tapes, concert tickets, and merchandise. I was curious enough about the careers of pop musicians to have scored interviews with acts like New Kids on the Block, Sweet Sensation, and Tiffany, something that might not happen as easily for a Midwestern high school student today.

My meeting with Tommy Page was a little more tense than my other interviews had been. Clearly, we were both gay, which made us slightly nervous I think, sitting alone together in a backstage room of Timberwolf amphitheater at Kings Island amusement park in 1990. After our interview was done, some radio guys from Q102, the big pop music station in Cincinnati, came in to record some on-air spots with Tommy. While the sound engineers were setting up the microphones, Tommy was just having fun with us, gossiping about stuff like Mariah Carey’s then-secret relationship with her boss, the label head of Columbia Records; this was just after Carey’s first single, “Vision of Love,” had been a huge radio hit. It all made such a lasting impression on me that I can vividly recall every detail in that backstage room to this day: the fluorescent lights, the faux-wood paneling, the gentle rasp in Tommy’s voice when he spoke, and the way his jet-black bangs fell to either side of his face.

A little less than a year ago now, on a cold Saturday morning in early March, I was stunned when I heard from a writer at Billboard magazine that Tommy Page had died from an apparent suicide the night before, alone at his country home in Pennsylvania. The former Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto, who’d been a close friend of Tommy’s when they were younger, broke the story online right after I found out. Following a string of albums and hit singles back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Tommy had forged a successful career as a music industry executive, and he’d also started a family with his husband Charlie, with whom he was raising three children. By coincidence, I would be in New York that next week on the day of Tommy’s funeral, so I took the hour-long bus ride from Port Authority down to his hometown of Caldwell, New Jersey, to attend the service that Wednesday morning.

It was heavy to carry my young memories from so long ago into the Presbyterian church there. Several women my age who were sitting together in the row in front of me, and who had known Tommy since childhood, cried throughout the entire service. The whole congregation wept when one of Tommy’s young sons spoke about his dad from the pulpit. Then one of Tommy’s brothers played a beautiful version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” which he said had been one of Tommy’s favorite songs. Most of the congregation quietly sang along. I think it came as a relief to us, in a time of grief and confusion, to share in the love of something simple like a pop song together.

Tommy released seven albums during the height of his recording career, with several songs that climbed up the pop and dance charts and enjoyed good runs there. By the mid-‘90s, his core audience had shifted from America to Asia, where he continued to perform annually to dedicated, appreciative audiences. Listening back through his discography over this past week, I was impressed by how diverse the styles of his albums are, ranging from Latin/freestyle club cuts to appealing pop ballads to some semi-classical numbers later in his oeuvre. My favorite of Tommy’s songs, 1990’s “I Break Down” (co-produced by Joe Mardin, son of legendary producer Arif Mardin), was re-recorded by Tommy in a gorgeous orchestral version in 2015; that new rendition was featured on his eighth and final album, a self-released compilation of songs hand-selected from his own catalog and simply titled My Favorites.

When Tommy Page’s eponymous debut album was released in 1988, I was working at Camelot Records in Northgate Mall, across the street from where I grew up in Cincinnati. I remember opening of a box of deliveries from Sire Records, Tommy’s label (and Madonna’s, too), then seeing Tommy’s Elvis-inspired cover photo starting up at me from a cassette near the top of the box. “Who’s that?” I thought. He had quietly arrived on the pop music scene with minimal fanfare, though that album did spawn his first radio hit, the ballad “A Shoulder to Cry On.” I was more drawn to the dance tracks on that album, like “A Zillion Kisses” and the endlessly fun, openly sexual “Turning Me On,” which are among the most club-ready songs that Tommy recorded. There’s also a pulsating number that he wrote and arranged with Grammy-nominated songwriter Shelly Peiken, “Love Takes Over,” as well as a catchy ode to non-conformity called “Hard to Be Normal.”

Tommy’s sophomore effort, Paintings in My Mind from 1990, would be his biggest commercial success, in part because of the involvement of New Kids on the Block, who were riding high on the wave of the boyband craze at the time. They shared credit for two songs on the album with Tommy: the bouncy “Turn on the Radio” and the heartfelt “I’ll Be Your Everything,” Tommy’s Billboard #1 single, the lyrics of which now poignantly sound like they could have been written for Tommy’s young daughter, Ruby. Tommy also sang the album’s duet “Don’t Give Up on Love” with Latin/freestyle artist Safire (aka Wilma Cosme), with whom he later formed a dance music partnership called Cosmic Page.

By the time his third album was released a year later, 1991’s From the Heart found Tommy Page reaching for a more mature sound. The record’s lead single, “Whenever You Close Your Eyes,” written by Michael Bolton and Diane Warren, with its soaring chorus and rousing gospel-choir backdrop, raised the bar for the next chapter of Tommy’s recording career. Songs such as the upbeat “Under the Rainbow” and a moving version of Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” proved that he was capable of sustaining a more refined form of drama on his records, suggesting in a carefully considered way that he (and his audience) had moved past teenage years and into adulthood.

Tommy’s next few albums were released in markets throughout Asia. A Friend to Rely On from 1992 opens with an awesome cover of Nik Kershaw’s mid-‘80s hit “Wouldn’t It Be Good,” while 1994’s Time contains excellent, pensively danceable tracks like “Places in My Heart” and “If I Had a Wish.” Loving You from 1996, titled after a number from Stephen Sondheim’s 1994 musical Passion, includes some of Tommy’s accomplished renditions of songs by other artists, like Cyndi Lauper’s “That’s What I Think” and John Waite’s “Missing You,” as well as another superb track written by Diane Warren, “I Keep Hoping.” A smart handful of cover songs also appears on Tommy’s self-released album Ten til Midnight from 2000: a hardcore house version of Breakfast Club’s 1987 hit “Right on Track,” which sounds like the kind of dance track that Tommy always wanted to record, Ari Gold's wonderful "Dance to the Beat of My Heart," and a sensitive rendering of Nikki’s popular 1990 single “Notice Me.”

The final post and photograph on Tommy Page’s Twitter timeline in January of 2017 indicates that he was working on new songs, something that’s heartbreaking to consider now, of course. I’ve thought of Tommy and his music often throughout the past year, and even so, it took me nearly twelve months to feel enough clarity about his tragic death to be able to write this post. I’m fortunate that I had a chance to meet him years ago, and I can find some comfort in knowing that his music will last.

Monday, January 1, 2018

As popular cinema grew ever more mainstream and dominant throughout 2017, in a year when even the political realm became more corporate and corrupt (who thought that could be possible?), the small arthouse films that appealed to me the most also got riskier and more ambitious than usual. When the artistic stakes are higher, it makes sense that this type of counter-balancing would take place, a kind of aesthetic resistance and survival instinct, which is also a refusal to give in to market demands, saying that artful movies aren’t going anywhere, and saying it more demonstratively and provocatively than in prior years.

David Lowery’s A Ghost Story lingered with me longer than any other movie that I saw in 2017. Even while I was watching it at the cinema, I knew that would be the case. Framed in a square with rounded corners in the center of the screen, to evoke the look of old printed snapshots from photo albums, the movie is a valentine to the idea of time, as well as a bold and resonant excavation of the meaning of time. On its quiet and undisturbed surface, it’s a story of grief, and one that many people who chose not to see the film thought was driven by a gimmick. A ghost under a flowing white sheet with eye-holes cut out of it haunts the home that Casey Affleck’s unnamed character shares with Rooney Mara’s unnamed character after Affleck’s character dies in a car crash early in the film.

Long, silent scenes in which the camera doesn’t move at all set up the action of the tale, as it were. The body of Affleck’s character, seen from a distance across the room, lying under a white sheet at the hospital. Mara’s grief-stricken character, sitting alone on the floor of their dark kitchen, methodically devouring an entire pie over several minutes. These scenes are not meant to try the viewer’s patience, but to put us in the characters’ mindset, and to begin to ask what it means for minutes, hours, days, and years to pass, both in the presence of others and in the absence of others. And an image that might seem sentimental elsewhere — the ghost repeatedly attempting to scratch open a painted-over crack in a wooden doorframe, in which Mara’s character has slipped a secret note — felt perfectly logical and moving to me.

When the succession of humans isn’t in the house, the ghost is never alone for too long. It can see another ghost in a similar predicament in the house across the way, and the two ghosts can even communicate with one another, at least for the audience’s purposes. Because this is a film that’s better to watch knowing less than more, I’ll leave the movie’s other rich details and innovations unexplained, except to mention that the film’s ambitions deepen and quicken when the entire movie pivots and the ghost cascades through time and space, only for time and space to loop back on themselves until the experience of the film circles into a seamless whole and vanishes all at once. Few films work on poetic association and pull it off, but this one does.

God’s Own Country, a British debut directed by Francis Lee, was the best gay-themed movie that I watched over this past year, and not just because everything turns out fine for the two central characters in the end. Set in the austere and rolling hills of Yorkshire, it’s the first gay movie since Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake that’s so fully formed by its immersive landscape and atmosphere. The story follows Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor), who’s become increasingly withdrawn and dissatisfied from living and feeling entrapped on his family’s remote sheep farm. A fast and discreet encounter with another young man after a livestock auction near the start of the film shows that Johnny’s not comfortable with anything more than casual sex, though a conversation with a female friend of Johnny’s outside of a pub also suggests that he has been somewhat openly gay, if also obviously self-stunted by his rural environment.

The appearance of Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a young Romanian man who comes to help out on Johnny’s farm, gradually changes all of that, and the film draws its intimate power from the slow dance of attraction in which the two men become entangled. It’s impossible not to compare the film to Brokeback Mountain, of course, and God’s Own Country alludes directly to its predecessor not only thorough sheep-herding, but also via articles of the men’s clothing that are shared and left behind. In a film whose dialogue is often spare, subtle and precise symbols convey more readily what the two men are feeling: repairing a stone wall together that they nonetheless remain on opposite sides of, an abandoned sweater that Johnny pulls over himself, echoing a riveting earlier scene in which Gheorghe protects a tiny lamb in a way that nudges harshness into tenderness. While I felt the screenplay ran out of road a bit by the end (an it’s an end that also seems a bit too easy to me), the film’s performances are beautifully calibrated, and Josh O’Connor’s transformation as Johnny struggles to re-emerge from himself is remarkable.

Unlike the two previous films, there’s very little that’s quiet in Darren Aronofsky’s mother! Starring his current real-life girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence, the movie has been almost universally lampooned and reviled, with just a brave handful of critics coming to its defense. It’s definitely the most demanding and artistically ambitious movie that I saw in 2017, as well as one of the funniest and most brutal films of this past year. The laughter and horror that I felt while watching mother! at the cinema were so close to each other that they sometimes almost coincided, and I haven’t experienced a film in a very long time which has accomplished that. Aronofsky also references everything from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Rosemary’s Baby, yet he still manages to create a film that’s rarely derivative and totally unique.

Most interpretations of mother! that I’ve read and heard since watching the film skitter along the allegorical surface of the movie; Jennifer Lawrence’s character represents Mother Nature, some viewers think, and how she’s been exploited by human beings. Others mention the biblical underpinnings of the farcical plot in the film’s first half, when Ed Harris’ character brings his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, to visit the home where the god-like figure of Javier Bardem, a reclusive poet, resides with his young wife played by Jennifer Lawrence. It unfolds as a strange comedy of manners until the two sons of the visiting couple crash the party, setting the second half of the film into motion with an act of violence that’s clearly intended to be likened to the story of Cain and Abel.

Beyond that point is where the film gets interesting and the metaphors go deeper. Although I don’t think Bardem’s character is a stand-in for Aronofsky himself as director, the film certainly does transmit messages about authoritative male power in that creative context, alongside and in contrast to how women (and particularly Hollywood actresses) get treated by audiences and the publicity machine of moviemaking: adored, sexualized, worshipped, scrutinized, shunted aside as time passes, then brutalized by the cult of celebrity as they age. (I couldn’t help thinking how this movie was made just when Hillary Clinton was being savaged in the press, the ultimate misogynistic takedown of a woman in a position of power.) The film’s most brilliant stroke is that the cult of celebrity becomes an actual uncontrollable cult, a cult that dismantles the entire house piece by piece and utterly invades the central couple’s privacy, to put it mildly. All of this unfolds as the mass violence of the past century stampedes across the screen in ways I’ve never before seen on film, and in ways I’m not sure any other director could achieve.

My favorite documentary of 2017, and the easiest film to love this past year, was Faces Places (or Visages Villages in French), directed by filmmakers and street photographers Agnès Varda and JR. A smart combination of a road movie, odd-couple comedy, and public art project, the film traces the journey of JR’s traveling “photography truck,” which produces larger-than-life printed images directly from a slot on the side of the vehicle. The pair drive from town to town through the French countryside, finding everyday people to photograph and meaningful stories to tell, always with some sort of humanistic or political slant. Then, they wheat-paste their large-scale images onto particular surfaces for particular reasons, creating outdoor art installations that may last for years and attract widespread attention, or become ephemeral within a brief period of time.

Early in the movie, the filmmakers encounter an older woman in an industrial town, who staunchly refuses to move out of her home and vacate it for developers. Because she’s resided there for nearly her entire life and now lives alone, her story immediately resonates with viewers; we feel like we know her in only a matter of minutes, just in time for her face to be emblazoned across the front of the building that she has a right not to leave. Three wives of shipyard workers in a port city also see their images blown up to gigantic sizes after they pose before towering stacks of multicolored shipping containers; their stories are as just as significant as those of the men who surround them.

Agnès Varda herself is a legend of French New Wave cinema, a contemporary and close colleague of Jean-Luc Godard (who has a certain kind of unflattering cameo late in the film), so her own personal stories are equally important in the documentary. After sharing her recollections of friends and artists from her youth, she and JR undertake one of the most memorable photography projects of the film, affixing a long-ago image of one of her deceased friends to the side of a military bunker from World War II that fell from a cliffside to the beach below, only to become upended and permanently lodged in the sand. She remarks how her friend (the late fashion photographer Guy Bourdin) now appears as if he’s in a cradle, just like he belonged there.

On the same day (Thanksgiving) that I saw Faces Places for a noon matinee at The Quad cinema in New York City, I went back to see another excellent documentary later that night. I had stayed a bit longer in New York to watch a preview in Union Square of the much-anticipated gay movie Call Me by Your Name, which left me more than a little disappointed, so right afterwards I walked back over to The Quad to watch Brimstone & Glory, Viktor Jakovleski’s dazzling short documentary about the Mexican town of Tultepec’s annual National Pyrotechnics Festival fireworks extravaganza. To go from the relative lack of expected fireworks in Call Me by Your Name to the abundantly real fireworks of Brimstone & Glory provided me with exactly the boost that I needed, accompanied by an intense soundtrack of percussion that had me drumming away on my pant-legs in the otherwise empty theater.

In addition to showing how the residents of Tultepec spend many months of each year manufacturing their fireworks by hand, the documentary focuses on both parts of the fireworks festival: the Castles of Fire, and the Burning of the Bulls. The first part of the festival, attended by thousands of spectators annually, features enormous ten-story towers of fireworks with many spinning parts. We climb up these towers with workers (who are wearing tiny portable cameras on their hats) as they’re being constructed, and we even see one tower get struck by lightning in a storm and begin to go off prematurely. The second part of the festival is much more interactive, with spectators carrying and running with piñata-like bulls the size of trucks, packed with and trailing fireworks, which the onlookers all then chase and dance in the wake of. A team of medics treats the injured who’ve been burned or gotten hot cinders in their eyes, including young children, who then jump right back in to chase the bulls some more, a community ritual in which they want to partake. To be amazed by such daring footage captured so close up and wonder how the filmmakers did it lifted me out of the theater and into the sky.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

It’s
easy for me to choose my favorite Christmas albums of all time because they’re
the same ones that I’ve pulled off of my CD shelf every December for the past twenty
years now. Typically, I play them on steady rotation from the middle of the
month through Christmas Day. I’m not a follower of any organized religion, but
these albums always give me a sense of peace at what can otherwise be a hectic
and difficult time of the year. Now that the snow is falling here in New
England once again, it’s time for me to return to that little stack of
wintertime albums. In addition to the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy
Records, 1965), which everyone already knows well enough that it needs no
further comment, here are some of the other holiday albums that I return to
annually, most of which are lesser known and fairly rare.

Acoustic Christmas
(Columbia Records, 1990), features a diverse roster of artists spanning
many genres. At the time of its release, several musicians on the compilation
were already quite celebrated (Judy Collins, Art Garfunkel, Laura Nyro), while
some others have since gone on to acclaimed careers (Rosanne Cash, Shawn
Colvin, Harry Connick, Jr.) or have somewhat faded from mainstream public view
(The Hooters, Poi Dog Pondering, Shelleyan Orphan). The late Laura Nyro’s
medley “Let It Be Me / The Christmas Song,” performed with a light piano and
keyboard, is one of the most beautiful cuts on the record, as is Judy Collins’
classic rendition of “The Little Road to Bethlehem.” “Winter Wonderland” and
“It Came upon a Midnight Clear” are finely delivered by Harry Connick, Jr. and
Rosanne Cash, respectively, while Art Garfunkel’s airy, multi-tracked vocals on
“Oh Come All Ye Faithful” are both reverent and haunting. Poi Dog Pondering’s
spirited version of the Hawaiian Christmas tune “Mele Kalikimaka” lends the
album a fun novelty song, and Shelleyan Orphan’s memorable “Ice” is the
collection’s lone original track.

Released
the same year as Acoustic Christmas, Christmas in the City (WTG/CBS Records,
1990) captures
quite well a specific moment in the evolution of pop music history: New York
City’s Latin/freestyle explosion. While a few of the artists on this
compilation scored national radio hits (The Cover Girls, George LaMond, Denise
Lopez, Brenda K. Starr), the rest of the acts fared well on the era’s dance
club scene. The Latin All Stars’ faithful version of the traditional “Feliz
Navidad” makes an obligatory appearance, and Brenda K. Starr’s upbeat, light-hearted
take on Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” feels fully
invested. Original tracks like Paris by Air’s “It’s Another Holiday” and Denise
Lopez’s “All I Want 4 Xmas Is Your Love” joyously recall the awesome Latin pop
of the ’80s and early ’90s. But the album’s truly excellent track is the Cover
Girls’ percussive, piano-infused “New York City Christmas,” a song that really
everybody should know, probably the best Christmas song created for a dance
floor that I’ve ever heard.

Among
Amy Grant’s several Christmas-themed albums, my favorite is definitely her
second holiday collection, Home for
Christmas (A&M Records, 1992). The vocals and orchestrations are
stellar throughout the album’s twelve tracks, and Grant covers a full range of
Christmas classics, from a pensive “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to
an uplifting “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” to a rollicking
“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Ballads like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”
and David Foster’s “Grown-Up Christmas List” are equally affecting, as are the
album’s original numbers, such as Carly Simon’s “The Night Before Christmas”
and two magisterial songs that Grant co-wrote with Chris Eaton, “Emmanuel, God
with Us” and “Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song),” which has steadily become a
favorite for other songwriters to cover.

Amy
Grant also contributed vocals to perhaps one of the best little-known holiday
albums ever, The Animals’ Christmas
(Columbia Records, 1986). A cantata composed by the great American songwriter
Jimmy Webb, with inspiration from a children’s book by Anne Thaxter Eaton, the
project was helmed by Art Garfunkel, who sings the album’s lyrics alongside Amy
Grant and the boys’ choir at St. Paul’s Church in London. This concept record
traces the story of the first Christmas night through the perspective of the animals
involved in the Christmas nativity tales. My favorite song in the cycle,
“Incredible Phat,” follows the innkeeper’s cat, who watches over the scene as
Mary and Joseph arrive, along with “three balmy old coots / in silver boots,”
and then leads the young couple “to a tumble-down shack” behind the inn, where
their child is born. The song is gorgeously introduced by “The Decree,” on
which Art Garfunkel sings the biblical account of the angel Gabriel, guiding
Joseph and Mary through the night. The album was also co-produced and
engineered by famed Beatles’ producer Geoff Emerick, so enough said.

Shawn
Colvin’s Holiday Songs and Lullabies
(Sony Music/Columbia Records, 1998) opens with one of my favorite renditions of
one of my very favorite winter songs, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” sung and played
with just the right amount of mournful melancholy that the song requires. As
the album’s title suggests, it’s a compendium of Christmas songs and tunes for
small children, recorded when Colvin was pregnant with her daughter. As a child
herself, Colvin had loved Maurice Sendak’s 1965 book Lullabies and Night Songs, and his artwork adorns the CD’s liner
notes. The lullabies that Colvin selected to include all fit the Christmas
theme: “Now the Day Is Over,” “All Through the Night,” “Evening Is a Little
Boy,” “The Christ Child’s Lullaby.” Likewise, the album’s holiday standards all
sound like lullabies: Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here,” the chiming
traditional “Love Came Down at Christmas,” a sparely arranged “Silent Night.”
And some of Colvin’s choices, like “Seal Lullaby” from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and the drifting “The
Night Will Never Stay,” approach the sublime.

Finally,
a pair of instrumental New Age albums always fit the mood perfectly at this
time of the year, when the days are short and the nights are cold and long.
Will Ackerman’s Windham Hill Records has released several superb compilation
albums in their Winter’s Solstice
series, but my favorite remains the original A Winter’s Solstice from 1985. Although a few of the tracks lean in
the direction of Christmas fare, such as David Qualey’s opening guitar version
of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Philip Aaberg’s moving “High Plains (Christmas
on the High-Line),” and Liz Story’s quiet piano rendition of “Greensleeves,”
other tracks evoke winter more broadly: Will Ackerman’s somber “New England
Morning,” Malcolm Dalglish’s darker-toned “Northumbrian Lullabye,” and Mark
Isham’s “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Another
Windham Hill artist, solo pianist George Winston, deserves the last slot on
this list for his pristine, beloved 1982 album December. Beginning with “Thanksgiving” and ending with “Peace,” plus
a virtuosic “Carol of the Bells” midway through, Winston’s December easily shows why it’s gathered such a wide international
audience over time. Five of the album’s twelve songs were composed by Winston,
one was written by jazz trumpeter Alfred S. Burt, and the other half are
traditional and classical pieces in the public domain, from the Appalachian
carol “Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head” to 18th-century carol “The Holly and the
Ivy” to variations on Pachelbel’s Canon. When December ends, its aura continues to echo into the new year.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

I
show documentaries in my classes as often as I assign readings, and I’ve long
told my students that they can learn as much from a good documentary as they
can from a good book. This year’s GlobeDocs Film Festival, sponsored by the
Boston Globe in conjunction with HUBweek, offered abundant evidence of just how
educationally rewarding well-crafted documentaries can be. Over the past
weekend, I watched seven excellent films, all at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard
Square, with topics ranging from the worldwide refugee crisis to restorative
justice to male ballet dancers to airboating in the Everglades.

The
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s latest film, Human Flow, provides a widescreen and consummately global
perspective on the current struggles of international migrants to overcome
forced displacement and settle in new lands. Covering refugees from 23
countries over one year, the movie’s scale is unmatched in addressing this
subject. Ai Weiwei’s camera steadily and intrepidly follows masses of migrants
as they trek together down muddy roads, up steep trails through mountainous
terrains, across rivers that they wade while carrying luggage and children in
their arms, and over oceans in solitary boats overflowing with passengers.

The
first half of Human Flow focuses more
on these vast streams of bodies and faces than individual stories, though the
film’s latter half does shift to consider particular narrative strands as well.
Several of the people whose stories make their way into the film still linger
powerfully in my memory: a man who fled Myanmar with other refugees and laments
being referred to as “boat people” when they’re all human beings whose futures
were destroyed by the brutality of the military junta
in their homeland; a group of young women in Gaza who express to the camera their
dream of traveling the world and then returning home; and a traumatized man
from Syria who weeps over the makeshift graves of his five family members who
drowned at sea while trying to sail to a new life in a better place.

The
final segments of the film include highly composed aerial drone footage of
sprawling temporary refugee camps and neatly organized migrant neighborhoods. The drone cameras pan across these
migrant spaces calmly and gradually, and one even descends straight down from
far overhead to land gently in a circle of people who have gathered around it.
These images suggest at once the enormity of the refugee crisis and the seeming
smallness of the 65 million individual lives currently affected, the largest number
of refugees since World War II. A former astronaut from Aleppo, Mohammad Fares,
through his own perspective on our planet from high above, summarizes the
film’s humanist global message: “We all have to share.”

Circle Up,
directed by Julie Mallozzi, is among the most profound and moving films I’ve
ever seen on the theme of forgiveness. Set in the Dorchester neighborhood of
Boston, the film tells the story of Janet Connors, whose son Joel was stabbed
to death in his apartment at age 19. Connors has since become a vocal
advocate and practitioner of restorative justice, seeking to help find
meaningful forms of redemption for those who have committed violent crimes,
including the men who killed her own son, rather than just calling for retribution
and incarcerating them through the court system. She facilitates community
“circles” to promote victim-offender dialogues as a form of individual and
communal healing; these circles of talking and listening about each other’s
tragedies are inherited from Native American peoples, whose practices are also
closely explored in the film.

The
documentary gathers much of its power from Connors’ relationship with one of
the men responsible for her son’s homicide. The man is identified in the
documentary only as “AJ,” and his face is never fully revealed on camera.
Filmed from behind in partial profile and partial shadow, he recounts the
experience of meeting Connors when she arranged to visit him in prison, mainly
so that she could share with him her own side of the tragic loss of her son. At
the time of the visit, he recalls, he was still too young to feel much in
response to what she shared. As required by law, their entire exchange was
transcribed on paper, a document to which AJ returned several years later when
he was placed in solitary confinement. Her words finally break through to him,
and he writes her a detailed letter, initiating a genuine plea for forgiveness
that changes the course of his life. After his release from prison, the two
visit Joel’s gravesite together as part of their reconciliation, an image that
I doubt will ever fully leave my mind.

I
also feel fortunate to have seen documentary portraits of two
extraordinary artists whose work I was totally unfamiliar with before watching
the films: the Brazilian ballet dancer Marcelo Gomes, and the late, celebrated Getty Images
photojournalist Chris Hondros. Anatomy of
a Male Ballet Dancer, finely directed by David Barba and James Pellerito,
presents Gomes as an effortlessly likable and professionally enduring
personality. Despite the intense physical demands of his 20-year international
career in ballet, beginning with his studies at Florida’s famed Harid
Conservatory to his present status as a principal performer with the American
Ballet Theatre, Gomes has persistently maintained a great sense of humor while
keeping his eye firmly fixed on the level horizon of his dreams.

While
the documentary focuses mostly on Gomes’ artistic and professional development
over time, his personal life and family life are also considered in the film.
He was among the first major male ballet dancers to come out as gay publicly
when he was featured on the cover of The
Advocate magazine; having been raised by a pair of gay uncles, he mentions
at one point in the movie that coming out as a teenager was no problem for him at
all, due to their example and caring influence. His relationship with his
father is also explored because at the time the film was made, his father had
still never traveled to see Gomes perform in an American Ballet Theatre
production in New York. His father was supportive of Marcelo’s decision to
pursue ballet from a young age, so having the opportunity for his father to
watch him dance on a New York stage is a wish that Gomes still hopes to fulfill
before he retires from his ballet career.

Photographer Chris Hondros, one of the most prominent photojournalists of the
past two decades, covered wars in Liberia, Iraq, and Libya, and his images
became some of the foundational touchstones of those conflicts for the general
public through news media outlets. One of his colleagues mentions that Hondros
“was there for every major world event” in recent years. He was killed at age
41 in 2011, during coverage of a violent combat situation in Libya. One of his
closest friends since childhood, the non-fiction author and filmmaker Greg
Campbell, has directed Hondros as a
deeply engrossing film that’s also a much-deserved memorial to Chris.

Several
interviewees in the documentary mention that Hondros’ pursuit of high-risk
scenarios abroad seemed to be authentically rooted in human empathy. He found
ways to re-connect with his subjects long after he had photographed them. For
instance, he sought out the young Liberian fighter at the center of what would
go on to be perhaps Hondros’ best-known image, urged the man to return to
school, and gave him the funding to help him do so, which the man later says
completely turned his life around in a positive direction. The dangers of Hondros’
career were manifold, but he continued to capture those images and cultivate
those relationships. When his mother Inge Hondros is interviewed in the film,
she recounts how Christopher’s father tried to dissuade him in his youth from
pursuing a career in photography, and she flat-out told Chris’ dad, “Zip it.”
That gave Hondros the chance to follow his true calling.

Finally,
I was quite surprised to enjoy Gladesmen:
The Last of the Sawgrass Cowboys as much as I did. I wasn’t sure before
watching the film if the topic of airboating in the Florida Everglades would
hold my interest, but director David Abel and his producing partner Andy Laub
have created a beautifully made and timely film that’s filled with entertaining
characters and important environmental issues. The backdrop of isolated south
Florida marshland, with its wide blue skies and spectacular sunsets, is itself
reason enough to see the film. But the people who inhabit it are equally
intriguing from start to finish because they’re fighting to maintain their
distinctive way of life. Congress recently passed legislation that will begin
to phase out private airboating in the Everglades; anyone who wasn’t at least
16-years-old in 1989 will no longer be permitted to operate an airboat
privately. The National Park Service sought to pass these laws for
environmental purposes. They claim that airboat trails through sawgrass are
re-routing the natural water flow in ways that harm the environment, and they
also want to eradicate hunting in the Everglades. Some gladesmen earn their
income from hunting for frogs, alligators, and other animals in the marshlands.

Lifelong
residents of the area, like the film’s key figure, Donnie Onstad, argue that
the gladesmen’s children and grandchildren should have a right to the same
idyllic upbringing and family rituals that he grew up with himself. Most of the
airboaters interviewed in the film mention how remote the territory is, and they
say that airboating is really the only way to access many locations. Others
remark, rightfully, that airboating is therefore a long-standing form of communing
peacefully with their natural environment, and a way of being at one with it.
But the most sobering comments in the film come from Professor Harold Wanless,
chair of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, who says without
question that, due to climate change and sea-level rise, coastal areas of
southern Florida will be overtaken by the ocean within the next century,
perhaps even sooner. For that reason, and many others witnessed in these
documentaries, I felt that the films in the GlobeDocs festival speak urgently
both to our present moment and to our future.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

I
remember about twelve years ago having lunch with a former friend and
colleague, when Everything but the Girl’s “Oxford Street,” from their 1988
album Idlewild, suddenly came on the restaurant’s
sound system. I was so surprised that anybody would even think of playing the
song that I perked up and admitted — seemingly outdated ’80s tune though it was
— that it had always been one of my favorite songs. My lunch companion replied
incredulously, “Really?” and I think
he even rolled his eyes at me a bit. To the uninitiated, it’s a song that
sounds like a long-lost soft rock ballad that an adult contemporary radio
station back then would have played. Not so cool or hip, he thought,
despite my insistence that he just wasn’t listening to the song closely
enough.

Before
I say anything more about the album itself, I want to say something important
about taste. The colleague I had lunch with is a former friend in part because I
don’t think taste should be informed too much by fear of what others will think
about our taste. Actually, I don’t think that sort of taste is really taste at
all; rather, it’s fallout from some kind of juvenile peer pressure that creeps into the
lives of many people I’ve known over time, and far past their middle school
days. Genuine taste is not a form of social currency. It’s sensibility, a map
of who we most authentically are as individuals, and that’s something I’ll
continue to defend, and probably forfeit more friendships over, until my time
here on earth is done.

Ben Watt and Tracey
Thorn recorded Idlewild
three decades ago now, in the autumn of 1987, about five years into their
career as a duo. When the album was released several months later,
they were both 25-years-old. The sophisti-pop movement in the United Kingdom was
still going strong, and I heard and loved it all from as far away as my
childhood hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. In a hilarious moment from a 1988 promotional
interview, Tracey explained that Idlewild
was titled after the original name of New York’s airport (now JFK) and said,
“The Americans have this wonderful knack for naming their places with a kind of
poetic imagination that seems to reveal itself nowhere else in their entire
culture.” That's somewhat harsh, but also largely true.

Nevertheless,
the homespun, measured tone of Idlewild, leaning away from jazz and more towards pop,
was clearly aiming for an American audience, although Everything but the Girl wouldn’t
begin to find an audience in America until their 1990 album The Language of Life. Lyrically, the
songs on Idlewild are very much
rooted in England, in a way that the Anglophile in me finds irresistible.
“Oxford Street” poignantly thinks ahead to London life by reaching back to
Tracey’s upbringing in Hatfield and her university years in Hull: “When I was ten I
thought my brother was god, / he’d lie in bed and turn out the light with a
fishing rod... / Then when I was nineteen, I thought the Humber would be /
the gateway from my little world into the real world.” I think it’s the smart
balance of lyricism and prosaic poise that makes me love this song so much, along with
its vocals delivered through a calm evenness that only Tracey Thorn can pull
off in exactly the way she does.

I
had never paid much attention to the subject of “These Early Days” until I was
listening to the album again tonight to write this review, even if this is an album
whose music itself I know totally by heart, having listened to it literally
hundreds of times. The song’s written for a child in Tracey’s life, a child
who’s only two at the time. Its gentle refrain (“though you may weary of this
vale of tears, / these days remember, always remember”) reminds me of Gerard
Manley Hopkins’ famous poem “Spring and Fall” and the child Margaret in that
poem (“yet you will weep and know why”), as she ponders the falling leaves and
her own mortality.

Another
of the album’s four singles, “I Always Was Your Girl,” counterpoints its airy
synthesizers and tenor saxophone with some down-to-earth humor, as Tracey sings
of a couple who feel ill-at-ease in the world: “You put your friends through
hell, / and that’s why we get along so well... / Self-assured and abusing
guests, / that’s the way I like you best.” Ben’s wistful lyrics and vocals on
“The Night I Heard Caruso Sing” extend the album into deeper territory (“if I
only do one thing, / I’ll sing songs to my father, / I’ll sing songs to my
child; / it’s time to hold your loved ones / while the chains are loosed and
the world runs wild”). And on a sunny summer holiday in Italy, “Lonesome for a
Place I Know” returns to dim rains of the UK: “The hedgerows and the townhalls...
/ something pulls, something I can’t define tells me England calls.”

Some
of the other songs on Idlewild got
considerably more attention, including an ace cover of “I Don’t Want to Talk
About It,” the song that was popularized by Rod Stewart a decade earlier, and
“Apron Strings,” which the film director John Hughes selected, in a less
subdued version, for the soundtrack of his 1988 movie She’s Having a Baby. The excellent B-sides from the album’s
singles, such as “Hang out the Flags,” “Home from Home,” and “Dyed in the Grain,”
also saw a second life when Idlewild
was re-issued as a deluxe edition (with many home demos and outtakes) by Edsel
Records in 2012. These extras are wonderful to have, of course, but so is the
original album, which remains in my top five favorite albums of all
time.